Amazon Buyer-Seller Messages let buyers and sellers communicate in security and privacy. However, they have a lot of restrictions. Here are the details you really need to know—and how to make the most of them if you’re a seller.

How the Amazon Buyer-Seller Messaging System Works

The system is simple: When a buyer contacts a seller, Amazon generates an encrypted email address for both parties. It looks something like zgnw8502ng0sm50mn1@marketplace.amazon.com.

This address works much like a normal email address. Sellers can even share them with their carrier for shipping notification purposes.

One thing works differently, though. Rather than messages traveling directly between the buyer and seller, they go through Amazon as a middleman. This lets Amazon filter out spam, catch anyone who breaks the rules, and archive your messages to help them deal with future disputes.

The Problems for Sellers

This system can make life hard for sellers. While it does provide a degree of Amazon seller protection, it mostly does the opposite—it protects Amazon from its own sellers. They know that you’d send your Amazon customers to your own website if they gave you half a chance. You might even try to move people to your eBay store, since the total cost of selling on eBay is usually 2% lower than on Amazon.

It can also make it tough to manage support. Amazon’s Buyer-Seller Messaging System has a few nice features, such as the ability to create templates and filter messages, but it’s years behind a modern helpdesk. And if you have an ecommerce website and eBay store on top of your Amazon seller account, juggling this system with the others can be a serious pain.

Here are the best ways to work within the system:

Marketing with Amazon Buyer-Seller Messages

Amazon puts a tight lid on marketing in any email to an Amazon customer. Your emails can’t contain any links at all, whether hyperlinked or in plain text, and they can’t include promotions or marketing messages. So, you can’t even promote the products you sell on Amazon or link to an Amazon page.

However, you can put your logo in the message if it doesn’t include a link.

This gives you a shot at enjoying the benefits of relationship marketing. Adding your logo to the message will show the buyer they aren’t purchasing from Amazon—they’re buying from you. Now you have a chance to create a loyal customer!

There’s just one problem: most buyers will only message you when something goes wrong. You absolutely must provide exceptional customer service to turn that negative experience into a positive one.

If you can do that, the benefits will be immense. You can at least expect to improve your Amazon seller rating. If things go really well, the customer may even look for you on Amazon when making future purchases—or search Google to see if your company has a website of its own, letting you sell to them fee-free.

However, the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service itself can make this tough. The email templates and filters are the only real efficiency tools it has, and they’re rudimentary. You’ll even have to manually type in the customer’s name every time.

And let’s say you’re selling on eBay and your own website. That means after dealing with your Amazon messages, you must log in to eBay and answer your messages there, and then switch to your email client and handle all the support for your site.

Upgrading to a Better Amazon Messaging Service

There is a solution to all these problems. You can answer all your ecommerce messages in one place, respond faster with more advanced tools, and start getting higher seller ratings and more repeat customers. You just need ChannelReply.

ChannelReply works as a connection between marketplaces like Amazon and eBay and the top helpdesks Zendesk and Desk.com. That means you can use all the powerful features of a helpdesk to provide better and faster answers to your Amazon messages. Save an immense amount of time with an Amazon autoresponder, make running your business easier with team management tools, and eliminate busywork like manually entering each customer’s name.

"ChannelReply has allowed us to increase the productivity of
our customer service department by consolidating the messaging
from multiple marketplaces directly into Zendesk. As with most
retail businesses, we sell on multiple online channels.
Streamlining customer interactions from these marketplaces
has been crucial to both our customers' experience and our growth.
ChannelReply has done a wonderful job in developing and supporting
this functionality."

JC Webster

COO, Chicago Music Exchange

"ChannelReply has allowed us to integrate multiple eBay and Amazon accounts
into Zendesk creating accountability and making it easy to scale our marketplace
customer service. Without ChannelReply it would be unmanageable to provide the
level of satisfaction our customers expect out of Golfio.
The integration with the eBay and Amazon messaging API is tight and we
couldn't be happier!"

Howard Choi

Business Dev Manager Golfio

"Given the various standards of service that apply, managing multiple marketplace
channels is a challenge to any organization. ChannelReply has given us the ability
to organize our inquries to maximize turnaround and increase our efficiency when
handling our marketplace requests. We look forward to additional features ChannelReply is offering that will only increase our ability to service our customers
across channels."